Heretic TOC presents a guest blog by Explorer, who has contributed many excellent comments here including a recent one that briefly introduced us to an interesting new organisation called Heart Progress. Today he delves deeper, exploring (well, he is Explorer!) the strengths and weaknesses of Heart Progress, and how heretics here could help it develop its potential as a force for good. Explorer is a young Russian from an intellectual home background, who enjoyed the benefits of growing up in the briefly libertarian atmosphere of the 1990s that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Qualified as a lawyer, he has a non-legal professional role which has brought him into lively discussion and debate with scientists and technicians, from whom he has learned much. He contributes to a range of online forums, sometimes taking people out of their intellectual comfort zone by presenting challenging ideas on a range of topics, such as parapsychology and anarchist politics, as well as intergenerational sexuality.

HEART PROGRESS COMMUNITY: A CASE FOR SELECTIVE SUPPORT

We live in interesting times, full of surprises; most of them, however, are unpleasant ones, like the regular news of the next stage of escalation of some military conflict, or yet another governmental decision to impose even more censorship, surveillance and persecution than we already have. Yet, thanks to the new Heretic TOC commenter Hypersonic, I learned something which has surprised me in a positive way. A very positive way, I would say!

Heart Progress Community: A Bright Side

Now we have a new activist community which holds not just a pro-paedosexual, but a pro-contact position: Heart Progress. This group of people openly aims to bring about the legalisation and normalisation of consensual child-adult sex. This is not another sad VirPed bunch begging society to accept them as human beings because of their promise to condemn and suppress their sexuality. Neither it is a therapeutic circle providing some help yet still insisting that its members should forever give up any hope of their sexual needs being actually satisfied. These are people who publicly claim that children are sexual beings who can consent to sexual relations with adults, and not get harmed in the process; and, therefore, there is no objective reason to forbid intergenerational sexual contact.

So, we are witnessing the birth of the first activist community to defend consensual child-adult sex in many, many years. We definitely haven’t seen such initiatives since the 1970s, the times of PIE and NAMBLA; and the organisations founded in this remote epoch either were destroyed by the authorities (as PIE was) or forced to remain largely silent and inactive, formally existing yet not being able to do anything noticed by the general public (the current state of NAMBLA). The only remaining activity has been the internet “paedosphere” – a network of websites where unrepentant paedophiles and their supporters have gathered. And this activity has generally been confined to its original circle of participants, unable to reach a wider audience.

And now, Heart Progress is concentrating its efforts on doing exactly this, taking the message beyond the confines to which it has until now been restricted by public opinion. This requires real nonconformity and courage, especially in view of the fact that the community’s list of participants is open and visible, with members who are active on social networks such as Twitter and Google+ (where it has a community page). Apparently many of these people are not paedophiles themselves, but activists in open solidarity with them, without hiding their identities. Such public support is a remarkable achievement.

Nor does Heart Progress limit its activity to online advocacy: it has already organised a public, real-life demonstration called “Breed Out the Hate”. This event was not dedicated to paedosexuality but to interracial marriage, intercourse and childbirth. The demo was apparently quite small; yet, a primarily pro-paedosexual organisation visibly engaged in real-life activism is something unseen since the 1970s (or, at best, the early 1980s).

This is laudable… but, for a balanced view, some unpleasant aspects of Heart Progress must also be taken into account.

Heart Progress Community: A Not-So-Bright Side

With all my sympathy for their paedo-activism cause, here I’ll have to criticise: Heart Progress people are, essentially, “social justice warriors” (SJWs), with all the notable negative traits these mainly left-wingers possess.

Like all SJWs, they have a tendency to dogmatic thinking, operating by slogans and clichés rather than reflective thought, and parroting currently fashionable Left positions without analyzing them critically. They often are overemotional and angry; they expect people to agree with them, and become furious when they don’t. They tend to overvalue their supporters and undervalue their opponents. They are unresponsive to constructive, non-hostile critique and persist in mistakes.

They easily fall for the temptation of reverse discrimination, and of accepting inverted versions of discriminative ideologies of the past. Let’s return to the Breed Out The Hate demonstration I mentioned above: according to some of the movement’s leading figures, the purpose of interracial couples is dissolution of white people’s genetic inheritance – inheritance, which, in their opinion, makes white people innately prone to violence, oppression, genocide and racism. They think that white people, because of their “evil” genes, have been the primary villains since the dawn of history; only by mixing their genetic lines with intrinsically peaceful and tolerant non-white genes, will they allow their progeny to become better. Such “biological pacification” would be manifested not only in genes, but in looks: with all people being of interracial heritage, everyone will look the same and so there would be no place for racist sentiments, which, according to their ideas, requires “whiteness” to begin with.

I think it is pretty obvious that such assertions have no basis in historical scholarship, biological science or simple life experience. It is an inverted version of the classic racist ideology of white American slave-owners of the past. This ideology was born out of the conflict between culture and society: exalted principles of personal freedom and ethical rejection of slavery clashed with the harsh political and economic needs of colonial imperialism and unrestrained capitalism. The result was an ugly, pseudo-scientific ideology that claimed non-white people are lower beings compared to white ones; they are “bestial”, “dangerous”, unable to control their aggressive impulses and thus in need of “benevolent” rule by their masters. Nowadays, we can see their faulty justifications of oppression turned on their heads and thrown in whites’ own faces.

As any person with some decent historical knowledge may attest, non-white civilizations committed atrocities as eagerly as white ones, and proclaimed their own superiority above everyone else just as easily. The Chinese Empire, founded on bloody warfare, bound together by merciless repression, and describing itself as the only civilized nation in the world (with everyone else, including white Europeans, demeaned as savages), is a good example. 20th century genocides and tyrannies were not exclusively white activity either: Mao Zedong was as willing to slaughter millions as Stalin and Hitler were; Japanese militarists were as prone to committing atrocities as German Nazis; the modern North Korean regime is hardly less totalitarian than any of its Western predecessors. So, there is no reason to claim that white people have done more cruel deeds, historically, than non-whites – and that their genetic inheritance is somehow tainted.

Here I need to emphasise that I have nothing against interracial marriage: if two people of different races are in love with each other, they should marry – or just live together without formally being spouses, if they want – and have as many interracial kids as they like, without fear of societal condemnation. But if a white man and a white woman love each other and want to have children, they should do it without being blamed for perpetuating their “evil” genes, or for being innately prone to violence themselves. Racism, like any other oppressive ideology, does not require “whiteness”; what it requires is a lust for power and wealth on the part of the elite ideologues and the willingness of the masses to believe them, feeling satisfied by their illusory superiority; and these elites and masses can be of any skin colour and genetic inheritance.

Selective Support and Why We Need to Give It

So, what should we do? Should we support Heart Progress? Yes, we should. It is vitally important to understand that we have to start our public activism in our actual situation, in the current circumstances that we cannot simply wish away. If we want to re-enter the Libertarian Left movement, we’ll have to deal with the SJWs who, whether we like it or not, are still apparently the leading faction.

Yet, our support shouldn’t be uncritical – while participating, we can and should raise our voice against the ideas and practices of Heart Progress in particular, and the modern Libertarian Left in general, which we find to be baseless, fallacious or counter-productive.

By doing it, we would be able to add a necessary diversity of ideas and approaches to the rebirthing of paedosexual activism and ensure that its supporters are not limited to SJWs. This is important for our public message: the general populace must see that intergenerational sex is defended by people with a range of ideological backgrounds. It must see that not all defenders of consensual intergenerational sex subscribe to nonsensical SJW notions.

This will also help to ensure the preservation of the pro-paedosexuality message when SJW ideology hits a crisis, which may happen sooner than we think. With all the emerging critical voices from within the Libertarian Left milieu, voices that justly point to the current absurd excesses of identity politics and “political correctness”, we would be able to continue our activism inside the future Libertarian Left scene, which will overcome SJW faults.

And it will help to restore the culture of critical thought and open dialogue which is sadly weak in our authoritarian times, when Left seems to compete with the Right in its censoriousness and rejection of complex rational analysis in the favour of simplistic emotional dogmas.

Some final remarks

The Libertarian Left movement is in a sad, I may even say “fallen”, state nowadays – especially if compared with its thriving mid-20th century version. But, with all its current faults, it is still better than its main rival, Alt-Right. With all its mistakes, the fundamental basis of the Libertarian Left ideal – an intent to create an egalitarian society, capable of progress wilfully driven by the people themselves, diverse and yet united in solidarity as regards respecting fundamental humanistic values, cooperative and yet supportive of individuality – is both viable and desirable. The Alt-Right, by contrast, based on a decisive rejection of equality, progress and everyone deviating from an arbitrary “traditional norm”, is unviable and undesirable from the start.

It is worth remembering that sometimes, somewhere, in some specific cases, Alt-Rightists do have valid points – in their critiques of SJW excesses, for example – but the basic principles on which they base their politics are still, in my opinion, fundamentally wrong ones. On the other hand, the Libertarian Left have made, and keep making, many mistakes, ones which have to be identified and criticised as such; but their basic principles are fundamentally correct. That’s why I’ll prefer to remain with the Libertarian Left, trying to repair, reform and renovate it, rather than bitterly abandon it because of its multiple current faults, such as pervasive SJW-ism.

And in the changeable and flexible society led by the Libertarian Left-led, paedosexuals and children alike may have a chance of liberation. In the rigid and normalcy-enforcing Alt-Right society, children can never be free and paedosexuals will be forever persecuted.

So, as I said before, and will repeat here, Heart Progress people are remarkably courageous, and are doing important work. They are the first ones in many years to do it. And as for the absurd ideas which some of their leading figures support, unfortunately, they are not the only ones supporting absurd ideas now. If we support them, we will be able to point them to their mistakes, and maybe even persuade some of them to give them up. Or, at least, we will make their community more diverse – with the benefits I described above.